Celebrations mark Cuba’s role in defense of Angola

BY SETH GALINSKY

Forty years ago, revolutionary Cuba began “Operation Carlota,” defending newly independent Angola from an invasion by the white-supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa.

The internationalist mission — Cuba’s largest ever, lasting 16 years and involving 425,000 Cuban volunteers — changed the history of Africa, Cuba and the world. Its legacy haunts U.S. imperialism to this day.

At the request of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Cuba in 1965 began providing instructors and training for the Angolan guerrillas, who were fighting for independence from Portuguese colonial rule.

“After the triumph of the ‘Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal [in April 1974], the country’s entire colonial empire was dismantled,” noted Cuban Gen. Álvaro López Miera in a Nov. 11 speech in Havana commemorating the 40th anniversary of Angolan independence. “The U.S. government, together with the racist regime in South Africa, sought to derail independence and impose a puppet government that would assure the continuation of imperialist interests.”

By mid-October 1975 troops and mercenaries had invaded from Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo] in the north and South Africa in the south. At the request of Agostinho Neto, leader of the MPLA, the Cuban government sent military instructors to train the Angolan forces.

On Nov. 2 a group of instructors and their students faced an attack by the invading forces in Benguela. Eight instructors and dozens of inexperienced Angola youth lost their lives.

Neto asked for Cuban aid. Without a moment’s hesitation, Cuba’s revolutionary leadership agreed. By Nov. 4 the first of 36,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers were on their way. López, today chief of the general staff of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, was among them. By Nov. 14 the South African troops were forced to retreat 620 miles.

“Operation Carlota” had begun. Then Defense Minister Raúl Castro chose the name to honor “an exceptional African woman, a slave in Cuba who led two rebellions against colonial oppression,” López said. “Captured after the second attempt [which began Nov. 5, 1843], she was drawn and quartered, just what the imperialists intended to do with Angola in 1975.”

Although the apartheid army was pushed back, the South African government and Washington had not given up hope of violently overturning the new government in Angola.

The internationalist volunteers — led by Cuban President Fidel Castro, who sometimes stayed round the clock in the command center in Cuba — “were decisive in bringing fundamental change to the history of southern Africa,” López said.

By March 1988 Cuban and Angolan troops defeated South Africa’s last attempt to turn back history at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. The victory not only secured Angola’s sovereignty, but forced the South African regime to concede independence to Namibia and gave a tremendous boost to the revolutionary struggle to end apartheid.

The mission also had a profound impact in Cuba.

Numerous articles in the Cuban press, and this year’s commemorations, are aimed at keeping alive and inspiring new generations in Cuba with this internationalist spirit.

An article titled “The Most Just, Prolonged, Massive and Successful International Military Campaign of Our Country” in the Nov. 5 issue of Granma notes that even now it’s almost impossible to find a household in Cuba that doesn’t have a family member or friend who had served in Angola.

Three of the Cuban Five — René González, Fernando González and Gerardo Hernández — were part of Operation Carlota. The Five are revolutionaries who were arrested, framed up and jailed in the United States in 1998. The last of them returned home in a victory for the Cuban Revolution last December.

“We will always keep in a special part of our hearts the pride of having participated in the freedom fight on the African continent,” Hernández said at a Nov. 5 commemoration at the Triunvirato sugar refinery, Matanzas province, where the slave uprising led by Carlota began in 1843.

‘Our moral high ground’

CubaDebate website published an article Nov. 5 by Operation Carlota veteran Ventura Carballido Pupo.

“I didn’t have any money in my pockets,” Carballido wrote about their return to Cuba, “because we were not mercenaries who went to war to risk our lives for money.”

“Our greatest wealth was the moral high ground, patriotism and the satisfaction of having done our duty to Fidel and the Party,” he added. “Without fondness for anything material, everything was happiness. Our greatest sadness was that not all of us returned alive.”

According to Granma, 2,016 Cubans died in Angola during the mission.

“Few times in history, has a war — the most terrible, heartrending and difficult action by humans — been accompanied by such a high degree of humanism and modesty by the victors,” Fidel Castro said in December 2005.

In his speech in Havana, López highlighted Cuba’s ongoing collaboration with Angola. Some 3,500 Cuban volunteers are working in Angola today in health, education, sports and construction. Cuban and Angolan volunteers have taught almost 1 million people there to read and write. And Cuba’s “Operation Miracle” has treated 600,000 patients and performed nearly 34,000 eye surgeries there. More than 2,000 Angolans are currently studying in Cuba, he said.

“The imperialists will never understand that we didn’t go to Angola to pursue material interests,” the Cuban general said. “We did it to pay our debt with the history of our brothers of African nations, blood brothers who fought for our independence, and with their sweat and blood helped forge and develop the wealth of our country.”

Related articles:
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UK court tells gov’t: ‘Give visa to René González’

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